OpenAI Taps Ex-Meta Exec to Lead Strategic Initiatives

OpenAI has reportedly named former Meta executive Irina Kofman to oversee the company’s strategic initiatives.

Kofman will report to OpenAI tech chief Mira Murati, with an initial focus on preparedness and safety, Bloomberg News reported Friday (Aug. 23), citing a company spokesperson. She worked for Meta for five years, most recently as a senior director of product management for generative artificial intelligence (AI), per her profile on LinkedIn.

The Bloomberg report noted that AI startups like OpenAI have been increasingly recruiting executives from larger tech firms — especially social media platforms — as they aim to compete with companies like Meta and Google.

For example, OpenAI in June named former Instagram and Twitter executive Kevin Weil as its chief product officer and former Nextdoor Chief Executive Officer Sarah Friar as finance chief. And rival AI firm Anthropic hired former Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger as chief product officer in May.

OpenAI has also suffered some high-profile exoduses, with former co-founder John Schulman and researcher Jan Leike both taking jobs at Anthropic.

Another OpenAI co-founder, Greg Brockman, announced earlier this month he was taking a sabbatical for the rest of 2024.

“First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago,” he wrote in a post on X. “The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build.”

AGI is a reference to “artificial general intelligence,” an as-yet-unrealized version of AI that can think and reason at the level of humans.

Meanwhile, OpenAI last week debuted an update to its AI capabilities, allowing developers to now fine-tune GPT-4o, the company’s most advanced language model, to meet specific business needs. This feature, long asked for by the tech sector, paves the way for customized AI applications across various industries. Fine-tuning is a process that enables developers to customize a pretrained AI model for specific tasks. 

OpenAI explains, “Developers can now fine-tune GPT-4o with custom datasets to get higher performance at a lower cost for their specific use cases. Fine-tuning enables the model to customize the structure and tone of responses or to follow complex domain-specific instructions.”

As PYMNTS noted, fine-tuning is critical for commerce because it lets businesses create AI tools tailored to their needs, enhancing customer service, streamlining operations, and promoting innovation. 

“For example, a retail company could fine-tune GPT-4o to understand product descriptions and customer inquiries better,” the report said. “At the same time, a financial firm might customize it to analyze market trends and generate reports.”

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.